the blog quebecois

i'm going to need two pair of shoes
when I get through walkin' to you
when I get back to new orleans

fats domino

New readers (one or two must trickle in occasionally -- I can dream, can't I?) might be wondering about my silence on the most important story of the last few days. Nothing to worry about. I routinely neglect big stories, not out of lack of concern, but because I rarely have anything to say that hasn't been said by someone else, quicker and better.

Having no specific knowledge of New Orleans or its environs; nor of hurricanes, rescue operations; nor of . . . much, really, now that I think about it -- I'm reduced to offering platitudes that however genuinely intended, always sound at least to me banal and trite.

So at least post links to charities and government pages and NGOs? I could do that. It's a mechanical process that I don't enjoy much, though, and in the time I could cobble together some half-assed list, the real pros like Glenn Reynolds and Michelle Malkin would have slapped up twice the information, with the usual extensive commentary to boot.

Also, I am supported in this by a Higher Authority: James Lileks:

So if I don't put up a big long list of charities, it's because I figure you can find them yourself - the Red Cross isn't exactly hiding in a shack in Utah waving a shotgun at anyone who comes up the road, and the Salvation Army can probably be summoned if you stand on a street corner with a Bible and a tuba and start belting out "Bringing in the Sheaves." I have nothing to recommend, but I donated here, because if it's good enough for Hugh Hewitt, then it works for me. As a brain-dead Rovebot automaton, that is.

If anything put me off reading the internets today, it was the two themes of perfidy and nuance. The former being the Bush-is-evil sites that can't wait for the President to show up at a tent city to do a photo-op in the breadline so they can drag out plastic turkey jokes, and the latter being sites that obsessed over the President's remarks today. I heard them. I was very underwhelmed. I suppose a bitten lip or a moist eye would have helped to part the waters of Canal St. like the Red Sea, but I don't expect moving rhetoric from him anymore. I think the White House has a tin ear these days � I heard another speech the other day about how They Hate Our Freedoms, and true though it may be it�s as fresh as a Pink Floyd tune on a classic FM station. I know; impressions are everything, appearances count. But as I get older I care less about the political value of a particular address and more about what actually happens, and I would prefer the 1950s sci-fi movie Authority Figure as the societal default, i.e., someone who bluntly states the facts and says "that"s all, boys - before leaving through a pebbled-glass door to do something, leaving the reporters shouting questions. Sometimes you just tire of spin, the endless carping, the incessant pissy miserabilism, to quote the Pet Shop Boys. It's as if there's a superior breed of humanity, uncorrupt and all-knowing, waiting in the wings to solve all our problems if only we'd let them have the reins of power and speak the honeyed words. Listen to them and human failings will be erased, nature turned aside like a man who enters a French restaurant in tennis shoes.

Which leads to the second and perhaps larger part of my malaise, and it is why I find writing about politics less and less appealing each day.

I was going to write something about New Orleans last night, but made the mistake of looking around to see what other people were saying, and it was at best disheartening.

This, written a few days ago (and he continues much in the same vein through today, if you can stand to read it) by someone calling himself The Canadian Cynic:

Oh, yawn. Apparently, fellow progressive blogger Joe is all up in arms over my apparent lack of compassion for the good folks of the Gulf coast, given that Hurricane Katrina seems about ready to redesign their landscape big time. To which I can, with a perfectly clear conscience, say, when it comes to things American, I've pretty much run out of said sympathy, natural disasters or otherwise.

I remind you of Oscar Wilde's aphorism: "A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing."

That was mild compared to this sewer of a thread at the Daily Kos.

Others have noted the trend. The Commissar at The Politburo Diktat published a handy chart with representative posts from the Left and Right. See if you can spot the difference.

I'm sick of it. Sick of people who preach on a platform of corpses; who compulsively comb through tragedy in search of that perfect political angle.

That doesn't mean that the cretins at Daily Kos and elsewhere shouldn't be challenged and called to account for their blind hatred. But it'll have to be done by people with more energy and stomach for the battle than me.

I'll continue to do what I do best -- celebrate what is true, and beautiful, and timeless.

And booger jokes.

We'll always have our booger jokes.

Features tonight are from the wonderful world of magic and misdirection.

First up is magician David Blaine, wringing the head off a chicken before horrified spectators. Relax, horrified spectators! It's only a chicken!

You can put a man in a trashcan. But can you keep him there?

This is a re-creation of a prison break in WWII. Note how the German guards fall for an illusion commonly seen in early vaudeville and music-hall productions.

she’s giving me excitations
i’m pickin’ up good vibrations
(oom bop bop good vibrations)

beach boys

The Scotsman:

Pay a few hundred pounds more for your new Citroën, for instance and, should the car stray left out of a motorway lane, the seat bolster will vibrate your left buttock - or your right buttock should you veer right - because the seat mechanism is linked to infrared cameras under the bumper which recognise white lines. It is a crude but highly effective technology aimed at halting the hundreds of deaths caused each year by drivers falling asleep behind the wheel.

Question: what if people, uhh, liked that sort of stuff? Wouldn't it lead to a lot of violent swerving to and fro? It'd be like watching race cars warming up their tires following the pace car.

Note the name of the post. Game of the Week. Not Exciting Game of the Week, or Fun Game of the Week, or Addictive Game of the Week. Game of the Week. I'm just telling you this so that you're not getting your hopes up. Sure, I could have called it Boring Game of the Week, or Lame Game of the Week, or Really Really Stupid Game of the Week, but then you probably wouldn't have read this far. Now that you have, what's a little bit more of your time to investigate this, the . . . Game of the Week.

If you can beat my time of 2:37, you will, uh, have beaten my time of 2:37. (That clock runs way too fast -- probably to try to trick you into thinking that you've spent many engrossing minutes playing . . . the Game of the Week.)

A beautiful animated video for "Plantage," a song by the previously unheard of Danish band Under Byen. There is a reason for that. Remember to turn down your speakers if you're at work. Remember to turn down your speakers if you're not at work.

The music is dreadful -- it sounds like Bjork with a hangover. Hers or yours. (Not that Bjork without a hangover is such a treat, either.)

movin' on up!
to the east side!
movin' on up!
to a dee-luxe apartment in the sky!

Barry/Dubois

I was checking out my stats on The Truth Laid Bear and grabbed this screen cap:

Note the first and last blögs listed. The latter is the official blög for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. You would think that it'd have far more links to it than this wee little venture, but I guess not. (I have no idea of how much traffic it gets, as there's no visible site counter.)

There are two ways to read this information:

1) I'm doing much better than I would have thought even a few months ago, closing in on the top thousand blögs, or;

2) The Democrats are doing much worse than anyone thought.

Not to worry -- I shall use my newfound power for good, not evil. Well, maybe just an itty-bitty pinch of evil. But mostly good. Say, an 80-20 split. That would be 80% for good, of course. I shouldn't have to explain that; but let there be no doubt: when it comes to a choice between good and evil, I am firmly on the side of good. Sorta.

�coz i�m lonely and i�m blue
i need you and your love too
come on and rescue me

the supremes

One of the mixed blessings about the CBC strike is that the sneering CBC reports on the New Orleans rescue efforts have been replaced with sneering BBC reports on the New Orleans rescue efforts. I'm looking at you Matt Fry! Take a bow, Gavin Hewitt!

To any dispassionate observer of Leviathan, the wonder is that the State accomplishes anything, let alone on time and/or on budget. By that standard -- admittedly a low bar to hurdle -- the US federal response to New Orleans has been nimble and creative, considering all the roadblocks the incompetent Governor of Louisiana and her sidekick Mayor have left in their wake.

I attribute that agility not to George Bush nor his bureaucrats, but to the initiative and common sense of ordinary Americans; when faced with situations that the rulebook doesn't allow for -- they toss out the rulebook and find out what works instead.

We in Canada don't need initiative or common sense. We have studies (in both official languages!) that prove it.

Natural disasters do not strike Canada, because Canadians are universally loved, especially by Mommy Earth. But should she (or more likely the Portland Hills Fault) slip up and accidentally level Vancouver with a 9+ Richter quake, our worries will be few, because our Government has been extensively preparing for this for years.

Unbeknownst to most Canadians, the authorities have been busy building an exact copy of Vancouver, complete with cars, house furnishings and heroin addicts, deep in the interior of B.C. And here's the genius part: the whole thing is mounted on millions of caster wheels, like on a dessert-cart.

Naturally, this has all been very expensive. Where did the money come from?

You remember all that AdScam stuff and alleged Liberal "corruption"? Silly children! That money was being diverted by selfless civil servants and politicians for the construction of "New Vancouver." That $2-billion "gun registry"? Every penny of it spent instead on tarps to conceal the project. (The locals don't suspect a thing.)

Within minutes of the tremors ceasing, a vast armada of helicopters (now do you see why the military couldn't have new ones?) equipped with powerful suction tubes will be vacuuming dazed Vancouverites out of the wreckage. Simultaneously the world's largest fleet of bulldozers will begin towing New Vancouver to its new home, detouring only to crush a few Conservative-voting towns.

Once the bulldozers arrive, they'll push what's left of Old Vancouver into the sea and install New Vancouver in its place. The helicopters will reverse suction and begin spitting dazed Vancouverites out to carry on with their lives. From there it's just a matter of turning the power back on, and then "It's Miller Time!"

We of course have a fallback strategy: we'll lie around in the rubble and whine until the Americans come and save us.

Yeah, that's doable. Let's hope they bring some Miller.

When Holly Marshall wanted to sell a pair of dangling earrings, a popular style these days, she listed them on eBay once, and got no takers. She tried a second time, and still no interest.

Was it the price? The fuzzy picture? Maybe the description: a beautiful pair of chandaleer earrings.

Such is the eBay underworld of misspellers, where the clueless � and sometimes just careless � sell labtop computers, throwing knifes, Art Deko vases, camras, comferters and saphires.

The quote is from a New York Times article (free registration required) that I wrote about last year. The point of it being that if people are getting little or no interest on what they're offering, then they might be willing to take a low bid. You can get some real bargains that way.

You could search for misspellings on eBay's site manually, but it'd be tough to think of every possible way words or phrases could be mangled. Automation to the rescue: Fat Fingers will calculate most of the permutations (doubled and transposed letters; also common typing errors) and search for them. I just did a search for "Xbox" and got over 230,000 returns. Most of those have clearly nothing to do with an Xbox or games or accessories for it, but you can edit them out and narrow the list down to manageable numbers.

Grubby commerce rears its ugly head with this week's collection of commercials with animation or computer-assisted imagery.

This one shows an Audi AG manuvering through a maze of freeway overpasses that make Los Angeles cloverleafs look modest and restrained.

Those Germans are at it again, in this animated ad for free-range chickens and eggs (if I'm reading it correctly). It's not a direct link -- you'll have to scroll down and click on "Play."

Animation World Network runs a yearly contest highlighting the best of the genre, has put together this year's winners. Here's one extolling the joys of public transit.

To see the others, with explanations of how they were done, go here. Some of them you'll probably recognize, like the famous Nike Golf ad featuring Tiger Woods as a young child "playing" at the British Open.

I have no idea who the Bloodhound Gang is, and I can't make head nor tails of this video, which is drenched in symbolism. Even the title, "Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo," seems to be coded in dense military jargon. Is it encrypted? Could it have something to do with Iraq?

The lyrics are a curious string of metaphors that will leave you baffled and scratching your head. I think people will be debating their meaning 40 years from now. It may be the "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds" of our age.

But never mind all that. The really exciting thing about this is that former CNN talking-head Tucker Carlson has a new gig as the lead singer for the band. He's traded in his bowtie for an even more ridiculous piece of neckware -- but there's no doubt about it; that's our Tucker!

down at the radio shack
we're turning shit into solid gold, solid gold
dirty enough i got me a love
and it's so bad, it's so bad

matthew good

Musician (and sanctimonious lefty blögger) Matthew Good is releasing a greatest hits compilation, titled In A Coma 1995-2005. Sometimes the jokes just write themselves, y'know?

I had thought that having actual hits was sort of a prerequisite for that sort of thing, but to each his own. I can think of maybe two songs of his that I've heard, and neither one registered strongly enough that I can recall the melody. Check out the innavigable promo page for it here.

One of the best computer art sites around is Worth1000. It has forums on using Photoshop, extensive galleries, and runs contests, some of which are for money (people wanting graphic designs, etc., will put up $50-100+ for something that meets their needs). It also has a superb tutorial section. A recent contribution to it was by "Grumplebits," explaining the steps in aging someone's face, using for an example the actress Katie Holmes, the future (?) / present(?) / former(?) Mrs. Tom Cruise. (I'm really not up on the latest Hollywood buzz.)

See, that's where the title comes from. One of Cruise's most famous roles was in Top Gun, and "Grumplebits" could also be considered a "Top Gun" of the . . . ah, forget it. Just go look.

I used a combination of the Stamp tool and Brush tool. I wish I could explain my technique at this point in a more clinical manner but mostly I relied on my artistic instincts. I emphasized the wrinkles around the eyes by widening and deepening the lines slightly and increasing the contrast by darkening the recesses and lightening the edges. Also, I extended wrinkles to the cheekbone areas. I then applied the same technique to the wrinkles around the mouth and to the forehead.

but when you love the greenback dollar
sorrow’s always bound to follow
reno dreams fade into neon amber

dolly parton

Wired:

It's late one Wednesday afternoon, and CptPokr is logged on to PartyPoker.com and ready to play. Onscreen, the captain exudes a certain brash charisma - broad shoulders, immaculate brown hair, restless animatronic eyes. He looks like he should be playing synth in Kraftwerk. Instead, he is seated at a virtual table with nine other avatars, wagering on limit Texas hold 'em. [. . .]

CptPokr is a robot. Unlike the other icons at the table, there is no human placing his bets and playing his cards. He is controlled by WinHoldEm, the first commercially available autoplaying poker software. Seat him at the table and he will apply strategy gleaned from decades of research. While carbon-based players munch Ding Dongs, yawn, guzzle beer, reply to email, take phone calls, and chat on IM, CptPokr (a pseudonym) is running the numbers so it will know, statistically, when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em.

As Momma always warned me, never play poker against a man named Doc, or a bot named Doc 3.0168 (build 5.7).

There's a similar problem in online chess, where people often use bots or chess software against opponents. The difference being that there's (at least on any of the servers I've used) no money on the table, just bragging rights.

This is a troubling (if predictable) development for the commercial poker sites, which employ hundreds of people to try and detect the bots. It's quite the technological arms race.

The article mentions one of the world's leading researchers on computer poker, the University of Alberta's Jonathan Schaeffer:

Other bots are appearing on the scene - including some that were never intended for online play. For the past 14 years, computer scientists at the University of Alberta Games Group have been building the poker version of Deep Blue: a program that can beat a top player, just as IBM's bot trumped Garry Kasparov in chess. "I'd love to be there when the computer raises the stakes by $100,000," says UA's Jonathan Schaeffer. "I want to see the bead of perspiration going down the human opponent's forehead. That's my dream."

Prof. Schaeffer's research project, Poki (you can download a free demo for Windows, MacOSX or Linux) is here.

While Poki is kicking your butt, you might as well look like a pro:

With enough practice you should be able to absentmindedly shuffle and cut a deck of cards with one hand while sorting your chips with the other. It's also a useful flourish for those interested in card tricks, and just generally for those interested in manual dexterity games.

A pallid and lame selection tonight, almost as pallid and lame as watching a white guy dance.

This is a sort of interactive Flash thing. You guide your character up, up, up, and he sort of interacts with things along the way.

To most critics, "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" was the weakest track on the Beatles' Abbey Road album. Apart from Paul McCartney, who wrote it, the Beatles tended to agree. John Lennon in particular hated it:

The song took three days of overdubbing because McCartney imagined that it could be a future single. John Lennon later recalled, "he did everything to make it into a single, and it never was and it never could have been." According to Lennon, the band spent more money on that song than any other on Abbey Road.

I thought the song was stagy and mannered myself, especially when McCartney chuckled during the line "Writing fifty times I must not be so". It sounded too rehearsed, but I've since read here and elsewhere that it was Paul's reaction to John, who was mooning him at the time.

Whatever. This is a good Flash animation of the song, and musically it was perhaps a bit better than I remembered.

Nippon Meat Packers:

It can make the ウイニー of the カタチ of the lovely animal and clean flower in the can tongue. If it makes together with the parent and child, certainly also the children the joy!

A pity Google's Japanese translator doesn't recognize certain characters. Note that essential words are left out. Now I'll never know what it means.

Feel free to develop your own sausage jokes.

The latest iteration of the EYEZMAZE puzzle universe; the picture shows it after being solved. I'd like to credit my mad logical skillz, but I don't have any, so I scalped the solution off someone who does. Follow the jump for instructions.

Warning: there's music and sound effects.

Shock-comic Tom Green once had Drew Barrymore. Now he's got a blóg. Make of that what you will.

Apart from a few clips on TV, I've never seen Green's act. But he did manage to make Mike Bullard sick to his stomach once, so that's gotta count for a few points.

I actually did a double-take when I ran across this headline at Bloomberg.com:

Specter Urges Delay in Replacement of O'Connor at Supreme Court

I could explain why it struck me as funny, but then you would be laughing at me, not with me.

Dostoyevsky wrote, "If God does not exist, everything is permitted."

That would explain Britney Spears.

Among other things.

Some of that crazy table tennis humor. What will those wacksters think of next?

A tradition at Wrigley Field in Chicago is to have a visiting celebrity lead the crowd in a chorus of "Take Me Out To The Ball Game." Ozzy Osbourne drooled his way through a recent performance, forgetting most of the words. Unfortunately former American Idol contestant William Hung remembered them.

Update: That was apparently filmed at Toronto's Skydome, not Wrigley Field.

I haven't seen this technique before, a sort of interactive Quick Time clip. Wait for it to load and then click on glowing objects in it (teapot, etc.) and the character will respond.

Warning: The subject matter is very dark and unpleasant -- it involves a self-mutilating doll. I'm not being ironic or coy about this. If you're likely to be disturbed by it, please don't click the link.